So Harriet Miers is resigning. To David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Jon Stewart, she was manna from the comedic heavens. But what was she to the rest of us? When scholars look back at Americans' images of themselves and their country at the turn of the 21st century, will Harriet Miers represent a mere comma in the pages of history?
Anita Hill thinks not. In her commentary, "Why Harried Miers Mattered," published in Ms. Magazine in 2006, Hill invites us to compare President Bush's presentation to the nation of his three candidates for the Supreme Court. The two successful candidates, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, were the ones who preceded and followed Miers.
John Roberts stood aside his wife and two children as Bush boasted that the nominee was selected from "among the most distinguished jurists and attorneys in the country." As for Samuel Alito, the President lauded his "distinguished record, his measured judicial temperaments and his tremendous personal integrity." Again, the tableau was the same: the nominee's wife and two children were right there with him.
It was different for Harriet Miers. Bush noted that Miers had served his administration for five years, but otherwise, as Anita Hill observed, "he gave her few accolades for her outstanding legal mind, her specific legal experiences and her long legal career." Moreover, Miers "appeared as a single woman without family - as though kin other than a spouse and children are insignificant."
Anita Hill made it clear to her readers that she was "not arguing that Miers should have been confirmed or even nominated,"and neither am I. Rather, Hill was pointing to the President's picture of judicial worthiness: "a white male with an Ivy League education, federal judicial experience and a traditional family." She wished that his appreciation were farther-reaching, so that "state court judicial experience" or "other forms of public service that have been more open to women" were also regarded as valuable.
Hill noticed another troubling presumption - that only men such as Roberts or Alito could speak for all Americans. She recounted the answer given by the Republican National Committee Chair when asked, after Alito's nomination, why Bush had not selected a woman or a Latino. Ken Mehlman said that the president had picked a person who would represent all of us.
The hints of sexism and racism implicit in statements such as Mehlman's have long been recognized. I'm more interested in the singlism, which so often slips by unnoticed. Marital status is especially important in that it can trump all other qualifications. You really can be a white male who is a Rhodes Scholar with degrees from Harvard and Oxford, plus federal judiciary experience, and still get The Singles Treatment. Just ask David Souter.
Here's what Newsweek said about Souter when he had been nominated by the first President Bush, but not yet confirmed:
"Souter has come to be known as a decent if drab ascetic: a 50-year-old man from rural, white New England who has never married, never had children, never really been part of the modern America that constitutional law must necessarily confront." Reflecting on "Souter's detachment," Newsweek asked, "does it reflect a stale mind and a narrow heart?" We must answer that question, Newsweek implored us, because "it is that perspective on life and law that will shape his decisions." (The quotes are from the September 17, 1990 issue, p. 33; the online archives only go back to 1993.)
I responded to Newsweek in my book, SINGLED OUT: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After (pp. 191-192). Here's part of my reply:
"Why exactly is Souter deemed not part of modern America? Considering the composition of the Court then and historically, surely Newsweek was not disqualifying Souter on the grounds that he was white or male. Does Newsweek mean to imply that only people who are married with children are part of modern America? That would be odd, in that even in 1990, only 26% of American households were comprised of married parents and their children."
"Maybe the point is that only people who are married with children have the proper 'perspective on life' that enables wise judgments on matters such as schools or obscenities. If so, then should it also follow that the Court needs to be packed with women to weigh in on matters such as abortion or reproductive technologies, or with gay men, lesbians, African-Americans and Arab-Americans to make richly informed decisions about matters pertaining to discrimination, due process, and civil rights?"
As for the issue of the shriveled heart, who really "has the narrowest heart - the husband who has invested his entire emotional portfolio into his wife and his children, or the single man who can value the people he finds valuable, whether friends or kin or colleagues, and can even-handedly weigh the health and well-being of all the world's children?"
I am not trying to rail against people with the same demographic profiles as Roberts or Alito. Some of my best friends are white men who are married with children. But 21st century America is a big, diverse nation facing formidable challenges. We need to draw from the talents of all of our citizens, rather than marginalizing and stigmatizing all but a chosen few.